{"id":88977,"date":"2015-08-20T13:15:45","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T17:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=88977"},"modified":"2015-08-20T16:09:53","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T20:09:53","slug":"long-story-short-in-the-studio-with-aidan-koch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/20\/long-story-short-in-the-studio-with-aidan-koch\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Story Short: In the Studio with Aidan Koch"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Amanda Hakan<\/p><\/div>\n

On Aidan Koch<\/a>\u2019s cover for our Summer issue<\/a>, six panels depict a woman lounging and reading and ruminating at the shore. Each panel exists both as a discrete event\u2014here, she looks at her book; here, she shades her eyes\u2014and as one sentence in a paragraph about the woman\u2019s day at the beach. The issue also features Koch\u2019s comic \u201cHeavenly Seas,\u201d the story of a woman who travels to a tropical location with a man she doesn\u2019t love. It is twenty-eight pages long and contains just over a hundred words of dialogue and no narration. The difference between \u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d and the cover sequence is like the difference between Lydia Davis\u2019s long short stories and her very short ones.<\/em><\/p>\n

Koch, a native of Olympia, Washington, is the author of three book-length comics\u2014<\/em>The Whale, <\/em>The Blonde Woman<\/a>, and, most recently, <\/em>Impressions<\/a>. She also makes sculptures, ceramics, and textiles that reinterpret the classical motifs that appear in many of her comics. Her narratives are elliptical, fragmentary, and open-ended; it seemed appropriate to include\u00a0\u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d in an issue that is largely about translation. Last month, I met Koch at her studio, in the basement of a tatty mansion she shares with eight other artists and a corn snake named Cleopatra, in Bushwick, Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

Where did the story for \u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d been trying to think about how to utilize the idea of traveling. I\u2019d read a couple of Paul Bowles books, and I liked how well he captured the mindset of how foreign places can seem to the traveler and how that\u2019s seductive but also scary. He also thought about people\u2019s attitudes in different countries and in confronting different cultures. That\u2019s something I\u2019d been considering, since it\u2019s a big part of my life. I\u2019ve been traveling constantly for the last three or four years. I left Portland in 2011 to travel and just didn\u2019t stop. I went to Spain and Turkey, then I was in Scandinavia and around Europe. My book Field Studies<\/em> documented 2012, when I lived in a different room in a different city every month, just because I didn\u2019t know what to do with myself. I thought maybe I\u2019d figure it out along the way. <\/p>\n

Did one of those places serve as the setting for for \u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are semi-Arabic shapes, so in my mind it\u2019s set somewhere around the Mediterranean, but I left it open, so it could be a European country that has an Islamic history, or somewhere off the coast, maybe Morocco. I had just been in Croatia, and they have that kind of mix there. The idea was to use travel as an escape. The main character is having a relationship issue, maybe it\u2019s the end of something. They\u2019re in a kind of limbo state emotionally, and this was maybe a last trip. She\u2019s using him\u2014she mentions how she didn\u2019t want to go there alone, and she\u2019s manipulated him so that she\u2019ll feel comfortable enough to go. And she\u2019s dealing with the guilt of that. The story slowly reveals that mindset.<\/p>\n

\"Koch<\/a>Does drawing in a fragmentary style, showing elements of an image rather than the whole image, allow you to describe that kind of interior state?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to compare comics to movies, but with drawing you\u2019re selecting what people see all the time instead of giving them a whole frame of imagery. I\u2019m taking that to an extreme, and I think that helps the play between watching a narrative and experiencing a narrative\u2014you don\u2019t necessarily know whether something is just what someone else is seeing or whether it’s something that\u2019s happening emotionally. I\u2019m trying to manipulate those things into a more encompassing experience, so that it\u2019s more about internalizing your own experience or relation to it than just having a scene playing out in front of you.<\/p>\n

If I drawn a whole scene that shows her whole body on a beach over and over, the reader is an outsider in relation to the story, a spectator, and it\u2019s a more voyeuristic experience. Whereas moving between her point of view, of her legs and looking up at the sky\u2014there\u2019s a part where I moved the water panels on their sides so that it\u2019s her perspective while she\u2019s lying down\u2014it\u2019s about her<\/em> vision. It\u2019s her<\/em> mindset. I like giving the images the ability to expand their meaning.<\/p>\n

The reader has to do a lot of work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, that\u2019s been a mild critique of my work. Some people are irritated by not understanding what\u2019s going on, whereas others are excited by that, excited to reread it and try and figure it out. Part of the point is that there is not necessarily a definitive view, so the more you read it, the more you might pick up on other details and see how they relate to each other.<\/p>\n

Do you put in recurring images as a way of leading the reader down a particular path? <\/strong><\/p>\n

It plays multiple roles. I learned early in making comics that sequence and pacing is important to building tone, so a lot of the repeated imagery is about figuring out how I want the story to unfold and at what speed I want it to unfold. But then it\u2019s a symbolic tool as well\u2014absence is also saying something.<\/p>\n

So little happens in most of your stories that I think time can\u2019t help but be a strong sensation. <\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was making The Blonde Woman<\/em>, I started breaking down time and creating disjointed sequences in which you couldn\u2019t be sure what was happening when. And part of that is just trying to represent her mindset, because it\u2019s about choosing between realities in a way, so having parallel actions emphasized that. I think about extending \u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d and making it into a circular story that will reflect the mindset of obsession, of thinking obsessively\u2014your brain going over and over the same ideas.<\/p>\n

\"Koch<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Where does yo<\/strong>ur interest in classicism and ancient cultures come from? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been obsessed with beautiful artifacts and objects. Going to the Met is one of my favorite things to do because I can just stare at gems or sculptures or jewelry. Painting, too. I enjoy it all aesthetically, but it\u2019s dangerous to leave it at that, to not understand the full history behind an object. Part of Impressions<\/em> was thinking about who painters\u2019 models tended to be, and that it\u2019s weird to think of all those paintings only in terms of being painted by men. They also show idealized female forms and manipulated the idea of female vanity, which plays back into patriarchal oppression. So to be comfortable liking those works, I have to confront their reality, too, and be critical of it.<\/p>\n

How do you do that in your own work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m figuring it out. Impressions<\/em> had to do with personal female identity and how, in the case of a painter\u2019s model, whether it\u2019s worth becoming anonymous for the sake of someone else using you for your beauty. Is it worth giving up an independent identity simply to become preserved in history as a beautiful thing? But it\u2019s also amazing to be visually celebrated. In many cases, it would have been impossible otherwise for those models to be remembered, but, of course, they\u2019re remembered as being someone else\u2019s depiction of them. Part of what I\u2019m doing is trying to bring those ideas into the conversation, even if it\u2019s indirect. In Impressions<\/em>, I didn\u2019t even want to draw the painter, because I felt that by putting a man in, it would automatically create a sense of sexual tension, which was never my intention. I wanted it to be safe. I wanted my characters to be naked but safe.<\/p>\n

You frequently paint without outlines, so that the color provides the form.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice to have options for how to depict things, depending on what\u2019s going on. Having the same level of information all the time constrains your view. I can change the way I represent something to give an idea of it without actually having to show it. Readers automatically associate things if you give them hints. If I showed a bunch of things in a row, you wouldn\u2019t necessarily know if they\u2019re related or how they\u2019re related, but the minute I give concrete information, you\u2019d see connections or resemblances.<\/p>\n

\"Koch<\/a><\/strong>Does the palette influence the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes the colors will dictate each other. If I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing and I start using one color, then that color becomes really important, and all the other colors I choose are based around that.<\/p>\n

If you decide to color a flower, say, vermilion, and you carry that flower through the story, does the flower take on a special symbolic or narrative significance? Does it dictate the story in that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It actually would work the other way, where if I did anything else in that color, it would then reference the flower, if the flower came first. In that sense it\u2019s a tool that I can utilize at any time. If I did the flower that color and then the next page there was a big dot that same color, the dot is then representative of the flower. I drew it once and now all I have to do is make a dot and it\u2019s the same as drawing a flower. I do that a lot, where I\u2019m like, Okay, I drew her face, now we know she has brown hair, so I\u2019ll just do this blob of brown, and it’s her, done, easy. It\u2019s nice not to have to beat the reader over the head with description. You don\u2019t need to be told or shown every little detail. And assuming people can\u2019t make that connection is not giving them much credit.<\/p>\n

Do you read any fiction that works in abstraction that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was teaching, I tried to find writing that could relate to what I talk about with comics. I shared a lot of Italo Calvino and Lydia Davis and a piece by Susan Sontag. They feel relevant to my own work.<\/p>\n

In what way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Relevant to thinking about narrative and building narrative and how it can come from so many different places. I feel like the biggest handicap for people just starting in comics is that they already have a story but it\u2019s usually epic and intense. It\u2019s their second year of school, and they\u2019re like, I\u2019ve been thinking about this two-hundred-page story for years and I\u2019m finally going to do it. That sounds like a nightmare! It\u2019s great to be able to give people an understanding of where narrative can come from intuitively and how little you need to get started.<\/p>\n

There are certain resemblances between your comics and Lydia Davis\u2019s stories, particularly in the idea that stories can come from anywhere.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My work has been compared to poetry, and when I first started, I definitely felt that way, and I think the way I wrote was more poetic, but I don\u2019t have a deep affiliation with poetry, and that\u2019s why her work was instantly so interesting to me. Her stories can be two lines, but they\u2019re not poetry, they\u2019re stories. That difference is important to me to because what I do just doesn\u2019t feel like making poems. I love narrative and creating characters, even for only a minute.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0038\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Have you tried working in a longer form? <\/strong><\/p>\n

My books are the longest works I\u2019ve made\u2014Impressions<\/em> is maybe seventy pages. It\u2019s hard for me to imagine a story longer than that. I\u2019m scared that writing something longer would force me to give too much information, and that\u2019s not what I\u2019m interested in. None of my characters even have names. I once called a character\u2019s dead partner \u201cS.\u201d That\u2019s about as far as I\u2019ll go. Now I don’t even bother.<\/p>\n

Your stories\u2014and Davis\u2019s, too, in a certain way\u2014are a bit like Rorschach tests, where the reader has to interpret minimal information, filling in a lot of the story, a lot of the picture, in order to give fuller meaning to it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I gave my class one of her very short stories and a page from Italo Calvino\u2019s Invisible Cities <\/em>to adapt into comics. The challenge with Davis was to find a way to express the weird undertones of the story, the emotional parts, because she doesn\u2019t say anything about that stuff, but her stories are still loaded. Whereas Calvino\u2019s were filled with imagery and metaphors, comparisons to grandiose objects and ideas that don\u2019t work technically as description. The challenge, then, was trying to figure out what something looked like or what was happening.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s amazing to give someone three sentences and tell them to make a one-page comic out of it and have them say, I have to do more, there\u2019s too much there.<\/p>\n

Self-editing\u2014what you can take out, what you should take out\u2014is a tough skill to learn.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s very hard in comics, and a big problem with comics, I think. I know people who have done one-hundred- to three-hundred-page books, and because they\u2019re that long, they’ve done storyboards and they have the dialogue written and assigned to images, and then they just do it. But they\u2019ve left no room for change, and because it\u2019s so laborious, they probably don\u2019t want to change anything as they go. They\u2019ve planned everything out for themselves, and I think that can detract from the possibilities that push the work.<\/p>\n

\"Koch-Notebook\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do you plan out your work before you draw it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Barely. I started one recently but the whole piece so far is just intuitive, working from loose ideas. This is my idea for extending the \u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d story\u2014it\u2019s just dialogue scraps and weird notes.<\/p>\n

But visually I leave it totally open. I try to get the general idea of what\u2019s going on. I\u2019ll plan things out vaguely, thinking about gradients, color, thickness and associating those things with emotions or tone or structure. I wanted \u201cHeavenly Seas\u201d to have a cyclical feeling, so at the end of part 2, when she\u2019s lost alone at night, I added a gradient that takes the reader to the next day but also takes them back in time to the start. But look, there\u2019s even a note about how many pages it should be and what it\u2019s about\u2014with a question mark.<\/p>\n

A selection of Koch\u2019s drawings and objects is currently on view at Picture Room<\/a>, in New York. She will be part of a group show at And Now<\/a> gallery in Dallas, Texas, beginning September 26.
<\/em><\/p>\n

Nicole Rudick is managing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Aidan Koch\u2019s cover for our Summer issue, six panels depict a woman lounging and reading and ruminating at the shore. Each panel exists both as a discrete event\u2014here, she looks at her book; here, she shades her eyes\u2014and as one sentence in a paragraph about the woman\u2019s day at the beach. The issue also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1857],"tags":[18323,35,8513,131,19209,18161,8755,576,67,4301,501,19208,123],"class_list":["post-88977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studio-visit","tag-aidan-koch","tag-art","tag-color","tag-comics","tag-impressions","tag-issue-213","tag-italo-calvino","tag-lydia-davis","tag-painting","tag-paul-bowles","tag-susan-sontag","tag-the-blonde-woman","tag-travel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn the Studio with Aidan Koch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The artist on travel and Lydia Davis as inspirations for the cover story in our Summer issue.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/20\/long-story-short-in-the-studio-with-aidan-koch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Long Story Short: In the Studio with Aidan Koch by Nicole Rudick\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 20, 2015 \u2013 On Aidan Koch\u2019s cover for our Summer issue, six panels depict a woman lounging and reading and ruminating at the shore. 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